When I took over the SEO responsibilities for the two companies where I work, I first and foremost focused on onpage optimization. As smart as Google is, it also plays by some set rules.

While this was somewhat of an overhaul (correct title and meta description length, implementing h1 tags, deleting meta keywords, writing more targeted text etc.) it did a lot in general for our search visibility. In two months the domain rank has risen 5 and out of 46 selected keywords, over 41 are on the first page of the SERPS and a large majority in 1-3.

While this does not at all show that h1 tags contribute to the results, it is highly likely. On a couple of localized versions of one of the companies, the h1 tag was omitted by mistake and comparing those with and those without h1 tags, there was a clear difference in how they had performed.

Speaking of Adwords - can it be confirmed whether or not AdWords has an impact (direct or indirect) on the SERPs? Sure, the channels that consumers go through to end up to a conversion can be a mix of paid, direct and organic traffic. But what about the SERPs themselves?

Great blog post and very interesting to read. I found myself pondering about this statement you made; "Remember, the No. 1 reason we have less and less competition each year is many aren't willing to pay the price of doing the little things over and over."

If anything - especially in e-commerce, the competition is steadily increasing every year and with the threshold being lower than ever to get into business online, more and more niche sites are popping up.

Going back to the theme of this blog post - "What content should I create?", I agree that it takes a lot of research and going back and forth to be able to pinpoint what interest your target group and what generates shares, likes and most importantly, traffic. I do have a question in this regard - is any of the content really valuable enough for the consumers? In the greater scheme, it is yet another form of bait to attract customers and to have them convert.

Everytime I see a "Top 10 reasons why you should buy X" or "Why you cannot live without X", i instantly think - well that's mainly if not solely to sell products. There's a sense of dishonesty in the mold of the content itself and that deters me from clicking (or at least convert on that site).

What are your thoughts on this? Do consumers and potential customers in general not think like this? Is it a side-effect of me working in this business, just as movie makers cannot enjoy movies the same way (thinking about angles, lightning, sound use etc. etc)

On-page optimization. There was none what so ever when I started. Now we rank in top 10 (mainly top 5) on the SERPS for the 50 keywords that generate the most traffic for us.

Even considering the fact that our domain and page authority in general is 1/3 of our competitors, we manage to get ahead in the SERPS. Also using site links and reviews (that show up in the SERP) make us stand out a lot.

I always try and correlate SEO efforts and jargon with scenarios that people are familiar with. SEO (as I see it) is simply building your business to be as efficient as possible. You would not go into a shop, if everything was impossible to find and all the products were randomly placed on the floor and unpriced. And you would definitely not go back. It's all about accommodating your customers and if you can make it as easy as possible for them, you've come a really long way.

Over are the days of meta keywords and keyword stuffing and boy am I glad! There is nothing worse than visiting a page that is stuffed with keywords and it takes away much of the focus.

Lovely to see both UX and SEO mentioned in this one. I have an academic background in UX and I have been doing SEO for some time now. It is really surprising how much these two areas overlap, again and again. As i mentioned somewhere else in the comment section - you cannot have one without the other. UX has long been taken for granted and with Google making SEO efforts more difficult, UX is suddenly brought back onto the front scene and praised as the new Messiah.

Anywho, I would love to see more UX-oriented material featured and discussed here on Moz. UX can be attributed to almost everything, but as with SEO, it's always going to be a balancing act.

Hi Sanoj Kumar. I'll just drop my 5 cents here. What do you mean that you are using UX with your new products? Hopefully you've been doing it all along. UX and SEO are not contradicting fields, they often (if not always) compliment each other in one way or another. It's a catch 22. You need people to be able to find you, but you also want people to stay on your website. You cannot have one without the other (well, you can, but it won't make much sense business-wise).

It seems like you need to optimize both areas as it sounds like people are not finding what they are looking for.

If every page and especially the unique pages is constructed to sell something, I think people would soon get tired of it. It is always refreshing to see what drives the company and who is behind the steering wheel. In this case ThinkGeek shows exactly that and nails it quite well.

For social media campaigns we mainly just make use of Googles URL builder. It makes it very easy to see where the customers are coming from and what they do from then on. But.. that is only the ones who come through our channels and who arrive at that specific piece of content. I would also be interested in hearing what other people are doing..

In general, there are many advantages in taking on this "surplus mentality". If you have time to help people, then you probably have a lot more going on. This overflow creates a (somewhat) illusion that you have plenty to give from.

You do not have to be the stereotypical marketer - you can also provide immense value and help people along the way. If it pays off, great! If not, then you probably learned something yourself in the process anyways. You know, like teachers learn a lot about themselves and their capabilities through teaching itself.

Great guide, Kelsey! Perfect for narrowing down all the small metrics that should be included in the creation of content. Easy to pass along to content writers who are then able to produce content of high quality, again and again. It might not always work, but it gets us pretty darn close!

Great content (pun intended)! But how do us SEOs who work within the retail business create quality content that creates loyalty and engagement? It seems to be more straight-forward, when you are selling services and not products.

Great read. Very informative and I enjoyed reading it very much. Although I cannot help to think that this would be the perfect check-list for creating pure click-bait content too, which makes it even more difficult to create quality content in general.